Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Parking mad

If you pick the right day
for your Christmas shopping, you might be lucky enough to get to park your car
for free.

Across the Black
Country and further afield, councils are scurrying around trying
to come up with special free parking deals to boost their town centres for the
festive spending spree.

So if you plan to go
late-night shopping in Stourbridge or Walsall,
shop around and you might save yourself £2.50 in parking costs.

The same applies for most of
the Saturdays in December.

Councils seem to think that
cutting the cost of parking on the busiest shopping days of the whole year will
somehow keep their ailing town centres in business for another 12 months.

Their attitude is that they
are doing us a tremendous favour by suspending charges for a few days.

Councillor Judy Foster, who
is responsible for transport in Dudley, pretty
much said as much.

"The suspension of car
park charges is seen as a goodwill gesture on behalf of the council and an
added incentive for shoppers to visit the borough on the run up to
Christmas," she declared magnanimously.

A goodwill gesture?
"Goodwill towards whom?" you may well ask.

Is this free parking
supposed to be a Christmas present to hard-pressed shoppers from their generous
local authorities?

Can it really be the case
that local authorities still don't realise they are systematically killing off
their town centres?

If they had any good sense,
never mind goodwill, they would realise their policy of trying to stop us from
using our cars was a major factor in the long, slow, painful decline of Britain's High
Streets.

Maybe not as short-sighted
as giving permission for out-of-town retail parks and superstores but every
little helps.

It is no exaggeration to say
many town centres are caught in an agonising death spiral. And parking charges
are one of the reasons why.

So is the internet. Why
bother to go to one of the last remaining CD or book shops when you can
download the same thing from the comfort of your own home?

Why traipse round clothes
shops when you can order what you want on line and send it back if it doesn't
fit?

To make matters worse, many
shop landlords bought their properties at the height of the boom.

Now they are stuck with
half-empty rows of buildings which are declining in value. So they increase the
rents.

That, in turn, prices some
retailers out of the market altogether. Small shopkeepers and national chains
are both caught by declining sales and rising rents.

This madness leads to more
and more charity shops, which don’t pay business rates, and boarded-up
buildings.

Things have got so bad Britain's
shopkeepers have now set up the Distressed Retail Property Taskforce.

The British Council of
Shopping Centres, the British Retail Consortium and the Property Bankers’ Forum
plan to spend six months trying to find a way out of this crisis.

Councils should be involved
as well. For decades they have seen their biggest shopping centres as
lucrative, pain-free sources of revenue.

Business rates and
car-parking charges have helped fund many a spendthrift local authority.

Yet with so many shopping
centres are in terminal decline, the best they can manage is an occasional
"goodwill gesture" for a day or two before Christmas.

The true attitude of local
councils is summed up in a recent report for Wolverhampton Council.

It says: "The Council
also has a responsibility to promote economic development and regeneration in
the City Centre and it recognises that the provision of accessible, high
quality car parking is an important factor in the economic success of the
City."

So far, so good. But then it
says: "At the same time, the Council needs to promote the effectiveness
and use of public transport to reduce the reliance on cars and to limit the
creation of more car parking spaces."

This attitude would be fine
if shopping centres were booming. But they are not. Half the time, they're
virtually deserted.

Don't be fooled by the
pre-Christmas crush. It's not usually like this. Councils should be haunted by
the fear that some of their centres are becoming ghost towns.

The "goodwill
gesture" of suspending parking charges in the run-up to Christmas clearly
shows councils believe these taxes play a part in deciding where people do
their shopping.

It proves they think free
parking is a key to boosting their town centres and, therefore, that they are
aware their charges deter shoppers. Actually, their policies set out
deliberately to alienate motorists.

The conclusion is obvious.
If they want to save their town centres, councils should invest in plentiful,
accessible, free car parking.

On its own this won't
reverse the decline but it would help. And it would give councils a chance to
cling on to the taxes and jobs lost every time another shop closes. The cost of
lost parking revenue is nothing compared with the high price of longer-term
decline.

Councils should realise free
parking is for life, not just for Christmas.